I’m not sanguine about 2009; I don’t think it’s going to be, objectively and materially, a good year for America or the world. That said, I hope and pray that even if it’s a hard year for all of us, that God uses those difficulties and those challenges to make us a better, wiser, more mature, and more godly people, and thus that it will be a year that bears good fruit in this nation in the future; and I pray for everyone who reads this that God will richly bless you this coming year in ways you do not expect and cannot see coming now, such that whatever happens, you will look back on 2009 as a good year, and one filled with joy.Happy New Year.
Category Archives: Personal
Weather and computers don’t mix
Why the power outages would come a couple days after the ice storm I have no idea, but so it has been; and why the ISP our church uses should have their DSL down I don’t know either, but so also it has been. As such, this is a very low-connectivity period for us; I’m hoping that will change very soon, as it’s quite irritating and more than a little limiting.
An ice day
It’s definitely high winter in the Midwest. The heaviest weight of this storm fell north of us, but we got a respectable amount of ice last night, though the temperature did rise above freezing and start melting some of that this afternoon; it will be interesting to see what the weekend brings. Anyway, I thought I’d post a few pictures (the rest after the break), because as destructive as they can be, ice storms are beautiful, too.
That tree isn’t having a good year; it had one of its trunks (if that’s the right word for them) break off earlier this year, and now it’s lost another one to the ice:
There’s even a little green under the ice:
Happy Thanksgiving!
I’d hoped to post this earlier, but haven’t been able to connect; but I wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving anyway. I hope you’ve had a wonderful one, full of the spirit of gratitude.And for the people of Mumbai, and especially for those directly affected by yesterday’s attacks, our prayers are with you.
Minor shameless plug
I have a bit of a project going with regard to our church’s website, with which I’m still dissatisfied. One of the things I’ve decided to try is creating a sermon blog on which to put the texts of my messages and to link to that from the main website. It’s not my preferred option, since it sends traffic off the church site and over to Blogger; but unless we’re willing to expand the budget for our site by a considerable amount, it looks to me like it will work better than anything else I’ve come up with.In any case, that blog is now up and running, and has the entirety of my just-concluded sermon series on Philemon and Colossians posted (more will follow over time); I’ve called it Of a Sunday, playing off the huge role that Billy Sunday and his wife had in the founding and early growth of WLPC, and each sermon is “posted” under the date on which it was preached. These are the straight texts I took into the pulpit, so they don’t include whatever changes I made in the course of delivery, but the essentials are all there. A number of them have provided material for blog posts, so those who read this site with any sort of regularity will find some familiar thoughts and ideas.
In case anyone is wondering . . .
. . . I really haven’t dropped off the face of the earth; but between being sick myself, having a sick wife and (for a while) a sick daughter, and major computer work at the church (which will be well worth it, when it’s done), I haven’t had a great deal of time or energy to put into this blog. (I’m also behind on e-mail as a result of the same issues, so if I haven’t gotten back to you, please, don’t give up on me.) A more normal posting schedule will no doubt resume when circumstances permit, but it probably won’t be until next week.In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to comment on Tyler Dawn’s recent post on the nature of prophecy, so I’ll recommend you go read it. Even if you believe the gift of prophecy ceased with the death of the first apostles, she has some good things to say about the nature of our relationship with God, and about what real Christian leadership looks like.
For those who served, and serve
I am the son of two Navy veterans, the nephew of a third, and the godson of a fourth. One of the earliest things I remember clearly was the time in second grade when I got to go on a Tiger Cruise—they flew us out to Honolulu where we met the carrier as it returned home at the end of the cruise, then we rode the ship back to its homeport in Alameda. I grew up around petty officers and former POWs. When one of our college students here described her chagrin at asking a friend if she would be living “on base” this year—and her friend’s complete incomprehension—I laughed, because I know that one; my freshman year in college was the first time I had ever lived anywhere outside that frame of reference.In short, as I’ve said before, I’m a Navy brat; for me, “veterans” aren’t people I read about, they’re faces I remember, faces of people I know and love. They are the people without whom we would all be speaking German, or Russian—or, someday, Arabic—but they’re also the people for whom we give thanks every time we see them that they came home, and those we remember who never did. They are my family, and the friends of my family, those who taught and cared for my parents and those my parents taught and for whom they cared in their turn. They are the defenders of our national freedom, and they stand before and around us to lay their blood, toil, tears and sweat at the feet of this country to keep us safe; and for me, and for many like me, their sacrifice and their gift is not merely abstract, it’s personal. May we never forget what they have done for all of us; may we never fail to honor their service; may we never cease in giving them the support they deserve.Dad, Mom, Uncle Bill, Auntie Barb, all of you: thank you.Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.—John 15:13
Not a holiday for introverts
Halloween isn’t, that is. For all that, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid, if only for the candy; but when the candy lost its charm (I have a sweet tooth, but for pastries), so did the holiday, for it’s a rather exhausting process. In recent years, I’ve discovered that it’s all the more so for parents. This year was easier; living someplace where we actually get trick-or-treaters, and with our daughters going around together with their friend from the neighborhood and her mother as well as their own, I got to sit on the front porch, read Dorothy Sayers, and hand out candy.Now, to a lot of folks, the idea that that might be preferable to going around extorting candy from neighbors probably sounds strange; those folks are, with (possibly) a few exceptions, extroverts. To extroverts, who are the loud majority of the human race, they are normal, and those of us who are introverts are “moody loners” who should be treated with some care because “some of them are serial killers.” My thanks for that phrasing goes to New Reflections Counseling, Inc., of western Ohio, for their “Introvert’s Lexicon,” which they describe as “a humorous look at the world from an Introvert’s point of view”; if you’re an extrovert and there’s an introvert in your life, I suggest you read it (and the material which follows it on that page), as it could be helpful to you. (If you want further information, you might also check out Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 piece in The Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert,” as well as the sidebar materials.)HT: cranekid
In the end, we can’t even foul it up properly
Well, that was a nasty bug. I’m used to riding them out, but that one took me down right and proper. It’s the first time I’ve had to call in sick on a Sunday in almost six years in ministry; and here over 40 hours from first onset, I’m still feeling pretty muzzy.This has left me with time to think, but not much working in the brainpan to do the thinking with; but in the altogether unsurprising fact that the church kept right on running without me, it has been a reminder that in all these things, God is at work. He takes our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, our faithfulness and our rebellion, and he uses all of it; which is not to say that it isn’t better to be faithful than to be rebellious, but simply to note that it’s beyond our ability even to surprise God, much less to derail him (though we can both delight and grieve him). Even if we devoted everything we had to trying to ruin his work, we would still find that he’d used what we’d done to accomplish his purposes.That’s not precisely what this poem, one of my favorites, is about; but there’s a common truth here, I think.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Catching up with the rest of the world
I’ve had a couple colleagues and friends after me for a while to join Facebook, and I finally got around to it, in case anyone is interested; if you want to look me up, feel free. 🙂